Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms.
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meta The company plans to lay off about 600 employees in its artificial intelligence division as it aims to reduce its hierarchy and become more agile, a company spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.
The company announced the layoffs in a memo from chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Employees in Meta’s AI Infrastructure division, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) division, and other product-related positions are affected.
However, the cuts did not affect employees within TBD Labs, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. TBD Labs includes many of the top AI hires hired by social media companies this summer. The employees, who were supervised by Mr. Wang, were spared layoffs, the people said, confirming that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was betting on higher pay than traditional employees.
Within Meta, the AI department is considered bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often competing for computing resources. When a new employee at the company joined the company to establish a superintelligence lab, he took over the oversized meta-AI division. The layoffs are Meta’s attempt to continue reducing divisions and further strengthen Wang’s role in steering the company’s AI strategy.
Meta supports OpenAI and googlepoured billions of dollars into infrastructure projects and hiring.
After the layoffs, Meta’s Superintelligence Institute now has just under 3,000 employees, according to people familiar with the matter.
Meta on Wednesday notified at least some employees that Nov. 21 is their termination date and that they will be placed on a “not-work notice period” until then.
“During this period, internal access will be removed and no additional work will be required for Meta,” the message, seen by CNBC, said. “You may want to use this time to look for another role in the meta.”
The company also said it would pay 16 weeks of severance pay, plus two weeks for every year of service “less any notice period.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg had grown frustrated with Meta’s AI advances, especially after the Llama 4 model released in April received a lukewarm response from developers.
Following Meta’s massive investment in Scale AI, Zuckerberg announced a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs, made up of top AI researchers and engineers. The group is led by Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
During its second-quarter earnings call in July, Meta said it now expects total expenses in 2025 to be in the range of $114 billion to $118 billion, raising the lower end of its previous outlook. Meta says its AI efforts will result in “year-over-year spending growth in 2026 exceeding spending growth in 2025,” and this number is expected to increase further.
Meta is scheduled to announce its third quarter results next week.
Meta Inc. announced Tuesday that it has signed a $27 billion deal with Blue Owl Capital to finance and develop a massive Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana. Zuckerberg said in a July post that the data center is expected to be large enough to cover “a significant portion of the Manhattan footprint.”
Axios first reported the layoffs.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report
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